One of the biggest changes to this release of Coyote Linux is
the use of C# as the primary development language used for
most of the administration, configuration, and maintenance
utilities. Previous implementations of Coyote Linux made heavy
use of C, Pascal (namely Delphi), and Bash shell scripting for
this purpose. The change is being made to C# after nearly 2
years of working with the language in a cross-platform setting
which involved the use of both Red Hat Linux and Windows
2003/2008 servers. The ability to use a single development
environment (in my case, Visual Studio 2008) and produce
executables that will execute in unmodified form on both Linux
and Windows has seriously put the “R” in RAD programming. I am
still actively involved in projects that require the
development of cross-platform utilities and am already paying
for all of the necessary licenses to provide my company with a
full array of software and hardware to develop applications
that work in a mixed server OS environment.

I have spent a great deal of time testing C# applications
under Linux using Mono as the executing environment. While
this is not necessarily the best choice for small, embedded
hardware (486 / ARM class processing power) it works very well
for anything using i686 or better technology. Another
wonderful advantage of using this technology is the ability to
run the same set of executables on both 32 and 64 bit hardware
without the need for compatibility libraries to be
installed. The installation of Mono dictates the 32/64 bit
execution environment, preventing the need to recompile the
full Coyote Linux software package.